OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Ontario teachers could be the ones doing the learning as cursive makes mandatory return to curriculum
Joseph Pugh, CBC, 2023/07/04

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A technique once used to ensure ink did not drip off your quill is of little to no value today. It became useless as soon as we had ball point pens. Some time in high school I decided I would never write in cursive again. It seemed to me pointless to go to that effort only to make my nice neat architectual lettering harder to read. Yet the subject keeps coming up again as the myths about it flow anew. This Metaverse post links to an article from 2016 making what would be my case: "the grip that cursive exerts on much of teaching practice is sustained only by a disturbing blend of traditionalism, institutional inertia, folklore, prejudice, and bribery. It suggests that what teachers 'know' about how children learn is sometimes more a product of the culture in which they're immersed than a result of research and data."

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From platitudes to pragmatics - Learnlets
Clark, Learnlets, 2023/07/04

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Clark Quinn weighs in on the question of awareness courses, suggesting that part of the problem with them "is a legacy belief that we're formal logical reasoning beings and so new information will change our behavior. (NOT!) It can also be because the client just doesn't know any better, nor have any greater insight than 'if they know it, it is good'." But, he says, we can infer to what people would do if they had that information (at least in the mind of the client) and design around that. "We need to give learners practice in dealing with the situations that use the information. I think we can work from platitudes to pragmatics, and should." I suppose. But it feels like a pretty light response. Image: wilderness and bear awareness.

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What's your tribe?
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2023/07/04

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I've never liked the use of the word 'tribe' to refer to social groupings on online society. Maybe it's because I've never felt like a member of one. But it's mostly it's because the phenomenon of tribalism often works against the wider interests of society. As George Packer wrote, "Tribes demand loyalty, and in return they confer the security of belonging. They're badges of identity, not of thought." They create a sense of "us vs. them". Sure, I get the sense of belonging being appealed to here. But learning is one thing; belonging to some special in-group is another. We need to be precise in our characterization, especially when it comes to talking about what traits of cooperation we value in learning.

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UK universities set out plans to use AI in teaching and assessment
Helen Packer, The PIE News, 2023/07/04

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The U.K.'s Russell Group of universities has released a set of guidelines for the use of AI. "It is important that all students and staff understand the opportunities, limitations and ethical issues associated with the use of these tools and can apply what they have learned as the capabilities of generative AI develop," they write. The wording could use some editing; for example, they write "while ethics codes exist, they may not be embedded within all generative AI tools," which in a descriptive sense probably means "they might not be embedded" but in a statement of principles (which this is) would have the sense of "they must not be embedded". Similarly, when I read "Our universities will develop resources and training opportunities," I wonder whether this is meant is a predictive sense, or a normative sense.

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Hive is already what Twitter's Bluesky aims to be
Dane Williams, LeoFinance, 2023/07/04

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The latest from Twitter is that you have to be logged in to view tweets, though as I discovered, the blockade isn't totally effective. And even if you're logged in, you can only view a limited number of tweets. This has resulted in another wave of defections; Mastodon saw traffic soar to new heights, while BlueSky halted signups (I'm still on the waitlist so I don't know what that even means). Meanwhile, the search for alternatives continues. Meta's Threads is set to launch Thursday. And this article brings you Hive, which is essentially a blockchain-based social network, "an ecosystem of over a hundred apps, communities & projects and is home to some of the most-used Web3 apps in the world, such as Splinterlands, PeakD and HiveBlog." I tried it but it was a spectacular failure; I'll try again in a day or two (I did learn a lot about recent changes to cryptocurrency law in Canada).

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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